“... what he is, what he is going to be. Anything is possible. His mother has been all morning in the woods and parks of St Petersburg; she lets the bounty of him fall to the floor with an exaggerated pouf!Perhaps this is why Chapter 15 of Glory glows so among his writings. It is where he chooses, and his doppelgängers choose – even though, as he states in the ...”

“... my wristwatch and cigarette case – all of which I had given him’.Channon was warned by John Gielgud that his liaison with Rattigan was all too public, while Nigel Birch, a clever, sarcastic Tory MP, teased him about the silk shirt he wore with the embroidered initials ‘TR’. Channon was acquainted with Lord Berners and ‘his crazier ...”

“... for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the cameras and gave a ‘V’ for victory sign the wrong way round. ‘She was smiling and telling the British people to fuck off at the same ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... with him his teenage son plus a bottle of wine, hoping that Sue would take the young man into the woods and initiate him into the arts of love. None of them had any doubt that this was a woman of the world whereas Sue was actually quite shy and couldn’t see that she had given them any cause to think otherwise. She hadn’t; she just looked like a Scarlet ...”

“... his eye could reach Fair structures, rain bow-hued, arose; And rich pavilions thro’ the opening woods Gleamed from their waving curtains sunny gold; And winding thro’ the verdant vale Flowed streams of liquid light; And fluted cypresses reared up Their living obelisks Such enchanted topographies are further glimpses of the Susquehannah life that never ...”

“... sketches of her personal past, and historical events such as the Shoah, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the perpetual alert of B-52s in the American prairie, or the Kyoto Accords. Still, her most shocking alteration of former habits occurred in Swarm (2000), in which her sentences disintegrated utterly. Her chief thematic preoccupation in Swarm is ...”

“... famous educational experiments in history. Itard had taken into his care a young boy found in the woods of the Aveyron. The boy had been without human contact for so long that he seemed almost an animal. Itard named him Victor and invented many exercises with the aim of turning him into an educated French child, although he ultimately conceded defeat and took ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... abuse and drugs. However, in November, the children had attended a Halloween party in Hamsterly Woods. The adults dressed up, and one of the party, called ‘Witch Smeg’, is said to have looked like one of the defendants. The first child to talk about ritual elements in the alleged abuse by adults said that they were ‘like Halloween’. As time went on ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... Official-Secrets-Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick woods, screening concrete bunkers and hunchbacked huts from the eyes of the curious, provide an excellent habitat for shy fauna, for monkjacks. During a period when sheep and pigs and cows, all the nursery favourites, were being taken out by snipers and bulldozed ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”